Big City of Dreams
Really this is much ado about nothing.
So, I was in New York City for the long Memorial Day Weekend which, surprisingly enough, actually felt like a long weekend. On Sunday, I thought I would engage in the true New Yorker lifestyle. I walked 13 blocks down to Quizno’s and had the outstanding regular sized Classic Italian (seriously folks, the sandwich is incredible). I then proceeded to navigate (such an appropriate word) “The World’s Largest Store,” Macy’s - home of 10 floors and over 500,000 items. Dependent upon your perspective, Macy’s can be a wonderful or, my usual slant, agitating-body-temperature-rising experience. In New York likeness, I spent way too long in the store, returned 2 items, bought two trendy items and left to go, of all places, to Starbucks.
While Starbucks has some very tasty treats and growing up in a coffee-drinking household has influenced me, I still have an extremely hard time justifying $3 for a cup of coffee, which is funny given the way I dismiss a $10 BlackJack bet loss. Back-in-the-day (humorous phrase for someone in his 20’s) a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts up the street from the peeps' crib was like $0.50-0.60 (may still be who knows)...
By the way, whatever forces have made it such that on the whole people are indeed convinced that higher price conveys higher quality is a powerful phenomenon.
...Nevertheless, I treated myself to my favorite, the Vanilla Bean Frappuccino, and engaged in a beautiful-day-stroll back uptown.
Randomly, Don Cheadle's opening punch line in Crash crept into my mind where he mused that Los Angeles drivers crash into one another just to feel something. That got me to thinking that Los Angeles and New York couldn’t be farther apart from each other, geographically…or the fact that everyone in L.A. is in cars and everyone in N.Y. is walking the streets.
I figured that by walking among the crowds in probably the busiest place in the contiguous United States that I would have a series of mini ‘collisions.’ (People complain that NYC streets are so busy and crowded. In my experience, if you simply walk on the street, you can do so pretty freely.) To my amazement, I strolled from 34th & 7th all the way to 47th & 8th without being touched by anybody…once. Seriously, that’s amazing. Long beautiful weekend in New York City meant people were everywhere (people usually are anyway). I suppose by being under control and unhurried, but still carefree, such an occurrence just might happen.
Fast forward to June 1 while walking to work:
If the timing just happens to work out, my walk to work will run right (alliteration) into the big push of people coming off the train around 9 am. Well it so happened on this day and it’s really an interesting sight. Everyone steaming ahead, maybe trying to make it by 9, maybe just in a hurry for the sake of being in a hurry, or maybe some just appearing hurried because of the environment…and then all peeling off as they reach their destinations. I wonder how it would look from the blimp view high above. I reckon...We all look like automatons in a big machine…
“We the machines inside the machine.” – Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison’s)
parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic (parenthetic)
So, I was in New York City for the long Memorial Day Weekend which, surprisingly enough, actually felt like a long weekend. On Sunday, I thought I would engage in the true New Yorker lifestyle. I walked 13 blocks down to Quizno’s and had the outstanding regular sized Classic Italian (seriously folks, the sandwich is incredible). I then proceeded to navigate (such an appropriate word) “The World’s Largest Store,” Macy’s - home of 10 floors and over 500,000 items. Dependent upon your perspective, Macy’s can be a wonderful or, my usual slant, agitating-body-temperature-rising experience. In New York likeness, I spent way too long in the store, returned 2 items, bought two trendy items and left to go, of all places, to Starbucks.
While Starbucks has some very tasty treats and growing up in a coffee-drinking household has influenced me, I still have an extremely hard time justifying $3 for a cup of coffee, which is funny given the way I dismiss a $10 BlackJack bet loss. Back-in-the-day (humorous phrase for someone in his 20’s) a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts up the street from the peeps' crib was like $0.50-0.60 (may still be who knows)...
By the way, whatever forces have made it such that on the whole people are indeed convinced that higher price conveys higher quality is a powerful phenomenon.
...Nevertheless, I treated myself to my favorite, the Vanilla Bean Frappuccino, and engaged in a beautiful-day-stroll back uptown.
Randomly, Don Cheadle's opening punch line in Crash crept into my mind where he mused that Los Angeles drivers crash into one another just to feel something. That got me to thinking that Los Angeles and New York couldn’t be farther apart from each other, geographically…or the fact that everyone in L.A. is in cars and everyone in N.Y. is walking the streets.
I figured that by walking among the crowds in probably the busiest place in the contiguous United States that I would have a series of mini ‘collisions.’ (People complain that NYC streets are so busy and crowded. In my experience, if you simply walk on the street, you can do so pretty freely.) To my amazement, I strolled from 34th & 7th all the way to 47th & 8th without being touched by anybody…once. Seriously, that’s amazing. Long beautiful weekend in New York City meant people were everywhere (people usually are anyway). I suppose by being under control and unhurried, but still carefree, such an occurrence just might happen.
Fast forward to June 1 while walking to work:
If the timing just happens to work out, my walk to work will run right (alliteration) into the big push of people coming off the train around 9 am. Well it so happened on this day and it’s really an interesting sight. Everyone steaming ahead, maybe trying to make it by 9, maybe just in a hurry for the sake of being in a hurry, or maybe some just appearing hurried because of the environment…and then all peeling off as they reach their destinations. I wonder how it would look from the blimp view high above. I reckon...We all look like automatons in a big machine…
“We the machines inside the machine.” – Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison’s)
parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic parenthetic (parenthetic)
posted by Aristocrates at 11:34 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home